An Author in Search of Characters: Pirandello and Commedia dell'arte

An Author in Search of Characters: Pirandello and Commedia dell'arte JAMES FISHER We Italians 'enjoyed' the industrial revolution after a long time-lag, So we are not yet a sufficiently modem nation to have forgotten the ancient feeling for satire. That is why we can still laugh, with a degree of cynicism, at the macabre dance which power and the civilisation that goes with it perfonns daily. without waiting for carnival.I Commedia dell'aIle was the rarest of theatrical forms - a non-literary theatre that emphasized the skill of the improvising actor. Commedia actors transformed human frailty into incisive satire as they literally created a play before the audience's eyes from a simple scenario. The popularity of commedia grew over the"centuries as the forms and characters it inspired evolved, supplying diverse and delightful entertainments throughout Europe's theatres. In many cultures, these commedic forms offered a style of ritualized carnival - a popular street theatre that served not only as communal fun, but also as a political instrument through its ever present satire and mockery of the powerful . This seemingly casual and lowly form of theatre became a distinctly powerful lingua franca of the imagination, connecting cultures and artists throughout Europe. Like the best and rarest forms of theatre, commedia was both spiritual and intellectual. It proved to be universally malleable and national, adapting in each country where it appeared to the needs of that cultureI s artists and audiences. Although some nineteenth century dramatists, artists, composers, and writers had been drawn to commedia characters and images, at the beginning of the twentieth century, almost simultaneously, a diverse group of playwrights , actors, directors, and designers rediscovered commedia in ways that would permanently change the direction of the modern theatre. Edward Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, and -Jacques Copeau, among many others, sought liberation from the pervasiveness of Realism, as well as from the stale remnants of elaborate spectacles, overwrought meloModern Drama, 35 (1992) 495 JAMES flSHER . dramas, and stilted acting styles of the preceding century. Perhaps due to the lack of concrete literary and performance evidence, these artists had highly individual and, at times, distinctly contradictory notions about commedia. Their understanding of its spirit and traditions permitted their rich imaginations wide scope as they attempted to derme commedia. Most of them viewed it as an amalgam of elements from traditional Italian commedia, as well as its many commedic antecedents and derivatives: classical comedy, medieval jesters and farces, the comedies of Moliere, the Venetian plays of Goldoni, the flabe of Gozzi, Pierrot> in the tradition of Deburau, pantomimes, music hall, circus, carnival, street entertainments of all kinds, and the variety stage. Significantly, they rediscovered improvisation, masks, stereotypical characters, and movement through their understanding of commedia. They also noted the centrality of the commedia actor who, aided by masks, could rise above realistic illusion to create larger-than-life and universal human symbols. The improvisatory commedia style, with its buoyant energy and direct assault on the senses of its audience, had virtually no parallel in modern theatre. These twentieth century iconoclasts share the view that commedia is theatrical art at its pinnacle of expressiveness and creativity. Many of them were drawn toward a kind of archetypal Jungian vision which reduced and also transformed life into a handful of simple plots and stereotypical figures that confront us with spiritual and intellectual glimpses of our deepest beings. The characters of commedia thus became the expression of the universally human; to the modern mind the characters' magic was powerful because it was a kind of street psychology, revealing directly who we humans are. Particularly in the character of Arlecchino, the leading zanni of commedia, modern theatre found a model in which tu embody an absurdly lyrical vision of contemporary humanity, leading ultimately to such varied creations as Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp," Beckett's and Ionesco's existential clowns, Handke's Kaspar, and the explosion of post-modem clowns and new vaudevillians in recent years. The rediscovery of commedia by Craig, Meyerhold, Reinhardt, Copeau, and their similarly inclined contemporaries, energized a new theatrical revolution, moving the theatre away from Realism toward a new Theatricalism. More to the point, modern theatre seems...